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The History of UFO Pumpkin

Ever wondered how UFO Pumpkin was born? The storied tale of UFO Pumpkin is one for the books. Tell this story around a campfire with friends and UFO Pumpkin in hand.

Pumpkin beer seems to be a phenomenon and we’re not arguing with its popularity. There are few things more wonderful than walking through an apple orchard in October and finishing your day with a pumpkin beer around a fire with friends. When we began brewing UFO Pumpkin we had these kinds of fall days in mind.

UFO Pumpkin was first brewed in 2011, at a time when pumpkin beers were becoming the hottest new thing. We tasted several and felt we could do a better job than anyone else out there, so we set out to get a slice of that pie (pun intended). One of our talented brewers at the time, Ken Hermann, had just made a pumpkin beer as a homebrew for a friend’s wedding and had some leftover bottles that he brought in or the rest of us to try. Everyone loved what he made and thus – pumpkin was born. With only a few tweaks, we pretty much followed Ken’s homebrew recipe to produce our UFO Pumpkin beer.

And with that, UFO was born.

It was designed as an Octoberfest base beer with pumpkin and spices blended in. The intent was to make it a taste like an actual beer with pumpkin, not just a pumpkin spice beer. Pumpkin was added in the mash and then a blend of spices in the whirlpool and later the fermentation vessel during cold conditioning. UFO Pumpkin was Ken’s first recipe made on a commercial level, and it went directly from a 15 gallon test batch to a full-sized (many-thousands-of-gallons!) batch with no steps in between. Go big or go home!

As most of our loyal UFO Pumpkin fans know, UFO Pumpkin took a brief hiatus in 2017 as the market had become oversaturated with the plethora of offerings in 2016. We didn’t want to be associated with something that was starting to generate a backlash. But thanks to those same loyal fans that made UFO Pumpkin such a success, we got an unprecedented amount of feedback looking forward to UFO Pumpkin and from fans missing their favorite fall beer. We couldn’t disappoint so we made a decision to bring it back, albeit on an extremely limited basis. We will be producing a small number of cases of cans and bottles, and even more limited draft of this wonderful beer to make sure it remains near & dear to its fans’ hearts. So if you love it and see it out there, grab some because it might be hard to find!